>And if among the barbarians, as we saw,
>the distinction between rights and duties could hardly be drawn,
>civilization makes the difference and antagonism between them clear
>even to the dullest intelligence by giving one class practically all
>the rights and the other class practically all the duties.
I just saw this from an interview with Mike Davis:
>Of course, in reality, it’s not white guys in
>the Rangers who make up most of the military
>presence overseas: it’s mostly slum kids
>themselves, from American inner cities. The new
>imperialism – like the old imperialism – has
>this advantage, that the metropolis itself is so
>violent, with such concentrated poverty, that it
>produces excellent warriors for these far-flung
>military campaigns. I remember reading a
>brilliant book once by a former professor of
>mine, at the University of Edinburgh, on British
>imperial warfare in the nineteenth century. He
>showed, against every expectation, that, in
>fact, most often for the British Army, in
>imperial wars, what was decisive wasn’t their
>possession of better weapons, or artillery, or
>Maxim guns: it was the ability of the British
>soldier to engage in personal carnage,
>hand-to-hand combat, up close with bayonets –
>and that was strictly a function of the brutality of life in British slums.
>
>Now, if you read the literature on warfare
>today, this is what the Pentagon’s really
>capitalizing on: they’re using the American
>inner city as a kind of combat laboratory, in
>addition to these urban test ranges they’ve
>built to study their new technologies. The slum
>dwellers’ response to this, and it’s a response
>that has yet to be answered – and maybe it’s
>unanswerable – is the poor man’s Air Force: the
>car bomb. That’s the subject of another book I’m
>finishing up right now, a short history of the
>car bomb. That has to be one of the most
>decisive military innovations of the late
>twentieth century. If you look at what’s
>happening in Iraq, it may be the Improvised
>Explosive Devices (IEDs) that are killing
>Americans, but what’s just ripping that country
>apart is these fortified car bomb attacks. The
>car bomb has given poor people in slums – small
>groups and networks – a new, extremely traumatic
>kind of geopolitical leverage.
>
>What’s happened, I think, at the end of the 20th
>century – and at the beginning of the 21st – is
>that the outcasts have discovered these
>extraordinarily cheap and horrific weapons.
>That's why I argue, in
><http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?link_code=ur2&tag=bldgblog-20&camp=1789&creative=9325&path=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2Fgp%2Fproduct%2F1844670228%2Fqid%3D1148343160%2Fsr%3D2-1%2Fref%3Dpd_bbs_b_2_1%3Fs%3Dbooks%26v%3Dglance%26n%3D283155>Planet
>of Slums, that they have “the gods of chaos” on their side.